Mirjam Zadoff became director of the Munich Documentation Center in May 2018. As well as holding overall responsibility for exhibitions, events, and the educational program, her work involves networking and representation as well as the strategic, content-related, and organizational development of the Documentation Center, which opened in 2015. One of the first exhibitions for which she was responsible Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, shown in 2019, signaled the new direction she sought to take and endowed the Documentation Center with its own distinctive signature. Alongside contemporary art, participation and digitalization now play a central role in the work of the Documentation Center. On her initiative, school students were invited to develop interventions for the permanent historical exhibition Munich and National Socialism, while the mobile game Forced Abroad and the digital exhibition Departure Neuaubing were both innovative projects that brought the Documentation Center international acclaim. Under Mirjam Zadoff’s direction the spectrum of the Documentation Center has broadened. It has become a place of discussion and dialogue about Germany’s past and about the relevance of this past for the present and future of Europe and beyond.
Prior to her appointment as director of the Documentation Center, Mirjam Zadoff was Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Indiana University in Bloomington (USA), where she held the Alvin H. Rosenfeld Chair. She completed her doctorate and post-doctoral studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) in Munich. Guest professorships took her to Zurich, Berkeley, Berlin, and Augsburg. In her research and teaching she focuses on remembrance culture, new ways of convey-ing history, and the role of museums as political and democratic institutions. These are also the topics to which Zadoff and her team dedicate their outreach work at the Munich Documentation Center. As well as drawing on her expertise in history, art, and culture, she is also willing to tread new paths and to cooperate with a variety of partners in order to reach a broad and diverse public.
Mirjam Zadoff has written guest commentaries for the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Freitag, and Die Presse newspapers. She teaches at the History Faculty of LMU Munich and has edited and authored many books, exhibition catalogues, and articles, including: Tell me about yesterday tomorrow, ed. with Nicolaus Schafhausen; Annette Kelm – Die Bücher, ed. with Udo Kittelmann and Nicolaus Schafhausen; Die Stadt ohne: Juden, Ausländer, Muslime, Flüchtlinge, ed. with Andreas Brunner, Barbara Staudinger, and Andreas Sulzenbacher; and the monographs Der rote Hiob. Das Leben des Werner Scholem (translated as Werner Scholem: A German Life) and Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad. Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne (translated as Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture), which have been translated into many languages.
As a holder of a number of honorary posts and memberships Mirjam Zadoff campaigns for an open society, for democracy and participation, and for scholarship, art, and (remembrance) culture. She is an associate member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, a member of the university council of the Munich Academy of Fine Arts, and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Munich University of Technology, of the German delegation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and the Bavarian America Academy. As a trustee and advisory board member she is an advocate for the Munich Volkshochschule (adult education), the Center for Israel Studies at LMU, and the hospice Dasein.
